Hey, man. Paint is expensive. No one would spill it on purpose over the beach.
I wonder if the paint is cured in such a short time between the tides - you have to clean the hull from the last tide, dry it and apply the paint, the paint needs to cure before the water comes back - it's not too many time to do the job...

I will paint my bottom with copper coat, so beaching and cleaning would be feasible without a re-paint for a decade they promise. We'll see.

I will do the copper coat application myself, and yes - it has to be sanded to activate the copper. It shines like copper the first days and after the oxidation of the surface it will become greenish - that's the perfect coat you want.

It's a lot of work, but DIY will costs for a 40ft cat around 2k€, so not 11 grand for nothing. The most work btw. is the scrubbing of the old antifouling paint and not the application of the new one - that is the fun part of the project.

It is then active and you will not have to scrub the hull any more intensively, just pressure-wash it or wipe the slime off. The hull must be sanded down to the gel coat prior application and also de-greased and de-waxed so the new copper coat attaches properly and does not peel off over the time. You still need to inspect the water intakes, anti-fouling does not help there much. If you experience problems - just give the coat a light sanding to activate more copper. You even can do it in the water with some abrasive stuff.

Read the instructions and stick to them - no short cuts, then you'll be happy for a long time.

There are lots of happy sailors with copper coat bottom out there and also many professional vessels. It has to be done right to be effective.

We do aim to ideally charter a favoured cat when we reach that stage but the models we like are not the typical charter market offerings. If I'm honest I wouldn't let doing that delay our purchase too long as each day planning the perfect choice is a lost day actually living the life we want... And none of us seem to have infinite time on our hands.

Another option is to volunteer as crew on candidate boats when they are making a passage. That also gives you the benefit of talking to the owner about their boat and getting first-hand knowledge from another buyer. It will be extremely informative.

It is a cruiser's adage to "buy the smallest boat that meets your needs" as the cost does go up, potentially exponentially with a bigger boat, but also just in terms of manageability. I know a very well respected broker with 100's of thousands of sea miles who has owned numerous big cruising boats over 35 years. He was previously an engineer before becoming a broker and knows boat systems inside and out. He sold a 40' boat, bought a 53' boat, and a few years later sold it and bought another 40' boat. When asked why, he said simply "Complexity. The bigger boat was just too complex."

The list of new boat owners who bought too big, only to realize too late what they've gotten themselves into is pretty damn long. Conversely the list of experienced owners who felt they bought a boat that is too small is pretty darn short.

I will do the copper coat application myself, and yes - it has to be sanded to activate the copper. It shines like copper the first days and after the oxidation of the surface it will become greenish - that's the perfect coat you want.

It's a lot of work, but DIY will costs for a 40ft cat around 2k€, so not 11 grand for nothing. The most work btw. is the scrubbing of the old antifouling paint and not the application of the new one - that is the fun part of the project.

It is then active and you will not have to scrub the hull any more intensively, just pressure-wash it or wipe the slime off. The hull must be sanded down to the gel coat prior application and also de-greased and de-waxed so the new copper coat attaches properly and does not peel off over the time. You still need to inspect the water intakes, anti-fouling does not help there much. If you experience problems - just give the coat a light sanding to activate more copper. You even can do it in the water with some abrasive stuff.

Read the instructions and stick to them - no short cuts, then you'll be happy for a long time.

There are lots of happy sailors with copper coat bottom out there and also many professional vessels. It has to be done right to be effective.

would be lovely if you document in pics the process and then actual results in some sort of blog. I would be interested coppercoat option as well.

Good luck.
I know more than one boat that has it and have since gone back to ablative antifoul over the top.

Plus they are still stuck with the weight penalty of the copper.

I want to do some blue water cruising and can not / do not want to haul out the boat all the time for re-painting somewhere in the world. Also the copper coat is a hard raisin and a good osmosis protection. If you are not happy, you can always paint over - but I think it will do the trick. Of course you have to clean the slime under water from time to time. As long as it has a green oxidation surface, it is active and protects the vessel, after couple of years you can re-activate another layer if needed.

There are many happy users too. It's like every product - some love it, some hate it. There is not an ultimative solution for the anti-foul, the environment regulation forbid poisonous substances, so abrasive anti foul could never be 100% effective either.

I recently helped put a copper epoxy antifoul on one of our sisterships. It's quite a process. Obviously the prep is the hard part, every bit of single pack paint has to come off. But luckily I wasn't involved in that part.

But even the application is pretty labour intensive. It was quite warm, and when you mixed up a batch there was only about 45 minutes of pot life, but it has to be applied in very thin coats, so you're rolling like hell to use up this expensive paint before it goes off, but trying not to put it on too thick. They say full coverage should only happen on the fourth coat.

While we were putting this on, we talked about how the old sailing ships used copper sheathing.

Started to wonder if something like gold leaf, only in copper might be possible.

My wife and I had a good chat about the responses to the question about finances on a longer boat. She is quite concerned about the near 50% increase in costs of ownership and that has left us perhaps contemplating a shorter cat. Our problem then is that the current offerings of what seem like 95% or maybe even 99% are in cats is that they have an interior that looks cheap when comparing it to many 50ft cats.
So we then started to consider that maybe what we should be doing is getting a shorter cat and refurbing it inside so that it looks like the interior of 50ft offerings (think Privilege etc), but that then leads on to the question of which Hull should we pick. Before anyone comes in we simply cannot afford the £1m Antares and don't like the layout. Are we missing something?

Unfortunately I will have to do it all by myself. But the Admiral will assist hopefully with mixing the next batch and cleaning after. So I think I will need up to 4 days of intensive painting, a day per one side of a hull.

On the other hand - I will have no one to blame if it does not work as expected. So win-win!

Our problem then is that the current offerings of what seem like 95% or maybe even 99% are in cats is that they have an interior that looks cheap when comparing it to many 50ft cats.
So we then started to consider that maybe what we should be doing is getting a shorter cat and refurbing it inside so that it looks like the interior of 50ft offerings (think Privilege etc), but that then leads on to the question of which Hull should we pick. Before anyone comes in we simply cannot afford the £1m Antares and don't like the layout. Are we missing something?

In that case you might as well just buy a 40 something foot Privilege. Materials used for the interior were the same from the 395 right the way through to the 745. The only bare white plastic anywhere in the interior is in the heads. Everywhere else is wood or the fake hessian material.

Things have changed a bit since I was buying but, back then, Privilege and Catana were the only two makes of cat my wife would contemplate buying as all the rest looked cheap.